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  • Gave a shit about school. Instead I was way too worried about finding that one girl for me. Now I’m dumb, poor, and have the most wonderful wife in the world… after a few false starts.

  • Kept in touch with friends.

    Got back on ADHD meds that my parents took me off as a 10yo as they didn't like the side effects.

    Exercised.

    Study, get the certification I ended up getting eventually (that i was repeatedly recommended to do but was too perpetually exhausted to study for), and breaking into IT as a career sooner.

    Not waste years 18-22 in a shitty grocery store/fast food job. To this day I can't stand to look at a rotisserie chicken cooker.

  • I wish I would have taken relationships less seriously. I started dating people when I was young because I thought it was what everyone was doing but I should have been having fun and goofing around.

    Investing in Bitcoin, I suppose, is the other thing. I nearly did it when people were paying multiple Bitcoins for a pizza for the novelty of it but stopped because I couldn't figure it out at the time.

  • I wish I had a solid social network and gone straight to university. Your social network is a vital part of life. I was in an advanced K-12 primary school and wish I had been born to intelligent atheists who valued intelligence. I had teachers that all but wanted to fight my parents about how they neglected my potential, but I had no context to really understand what all that meant.

  • Looked inward and truly considered how my words and actions affected others

    I (emotionally) hurt someone I cared about deeply, and it has taken years of work and therapy to begin to move past it

  • Gotten on antidepressants immediately after high school. I would have had my shit completely together by the time I graduated from community college and either succeeded in my original field (music recording) or gone to engineering school and finished before the pandemic.

  • For a long time, I'd say accept that nothing was going to happen with this girl I fell for at the time, and focus on my writing (what I was in college for at the time, with an eye to getting into a great program at the uni down the road for slighty less total cost than just going there).

    I've since learned it's important not to focus on what you could've done differently in the past. It's done, and it lead to wherever you are today. But boy, did that person - more accurately, the situation I found myself in re: that person - cause a series of events that included some pretty dark times.

    But who's to say life right now would be better for it?

  • I wish I had gone straight into college even though I was incredibly depressed and suffering from cptsd.

    I could have been depressed and living in a dorm and possibly getting into wacky adventures or meeting somebody to love me rather than being depressed and living in my truck and scooting from minimum wage job to minimum wage job for 7 years before I finally started to get my shit together.

  • Learned more about people's behavior, including my own, through (evolutionary) psychology, philosophy, history and so on.

    How and why people (including oneself with this) behave the way they do is the most important thing I have learned in my life, unfortunately pretty late.

    Still glad I've done it at all, many people never do.

79 comments